(Post-)Habsburg Modernity Workshop

9 July 2026 13:00 – 10 July 17:30

What is Central Europe contribution to global progress and modernity?
Workshop with support from Institute of Political History, ProletGard ERC Starting Grant project, Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies

Date: Budapest, July 9-10 2026

Venue: CEU Campus, Nádor utca 15, Room 106

Recent scholarship has highlighted – often in a slightly sensationalist way – the Austrian and Austro-Hungarian origins of theories, ideas, ideologies and institutions shaping the current global conditions or contributing to transnational, often global governance, like the Austrian school of economics and neoliberalism, the Interpol, or even the European Union. While such sporadic forays into the history of modernity hardly deliver a consistent picture of how Austria-Hungary was embedded in the process of making modernity, together with fascinating ongoing research projects carried out by mostly early career scholars, they certainly encourage a more systemic take on this broad question. One that goes beyond the customary themes of earlier scholarship psychoanalysis, scientific transfers or individual biographies.

At our workshop we are looking for answers to the question how the conditions of Austria-Hungary shaped progress and the global process of modernization since the late 19th century. Progress was not a homogenous phenomenon following a model that was replicated all over the world similarly. Instead, it was a process that flowed from region to region, often back and forth while reshaping society and social conditions, based on the inputs coming from everywhere. Europe in a broader sense was central to this process as a node, but so it was the US, as a pole within a binary with Europe already in the perception of contemporaries. Many saw a model of modernity emerging in the US and spreading to Europe and beyond, generating tensions and conflicts later subsumed under the rubric of Americanization. Moreover, even the post-WWI international order, with the League of Nations and its transnational expert organizations was understood as realization of a new concept of transnational governance and part of a US plan of lasting world peace.

This dichotomy is, however, often misconceived as not everything coming from the US had American origins. Certainly, the US played a central role in shaping the 20th century, but – exactly because of its outsized role within financial and business networks, the significance of its universities, the activities of its generously endowed charitable foundations, the influence of its popular and mass culture – it was not infrequently just a transmitter of thoughts and ideas emerging elsewhere – and a battlefield of ideas from abroad about how the US and through the US the global modernity should look like?

While it is premature to make judgments about how much one or the other region shaped global modernity, one thing is clear: Austria-Hungary was fully embedded into these changes. Our workshop not only contends that its own conditions were absorbed by the global process and shaped it significantly. It uses its example to understand this process of absorption and transfer better and to highlight its unique (post-)Habsburg features.

Thus, this venue attempts to exploit the complex and ever more central role of the US in shaping Western modernity to inquire about the role of Central Europe in a broader and that of Austria-Hungary in a narrower sense too. We will look at ideas and the persons promoting them which travelled from Austria-Hungary to the US and had a significant impact on social, cultural, economic, political changes there and globally too. We also look at ideas coming from the US, especially when transmitted through (post-)Habsburg figures, as these cases highlight the best adaptation and adoption. With applying this lens, we hope to capture the salience of the Central European conditions in shaping global history in unexpected and often invisible ways.

That means that we invite papers that go beyond a description of transfers in terms of content and adaptation. The participants are asked to elaborate on how the specific ideas and/or the specific biographies of their promoters were formed within the context of Austria-Hungary and Central Europe. In what ways they reflect experiences from there and in which ways those experienced were linked to general and global issues of progress and modernity,

Moreover, we contrast the main, (post-Habsburg) cases with a few other Central European ones in order to grasp the potential difference between the Central European contribution in general and the specifics of the (post-)Habsburg one. Thus, we are looking at cases in which the US or Central Europe, including the (post-)Habsburg region were not just origins, but conduits of progress, got entangled in the process of emerging modernity, and with bringing them in comparison, we hope to elucidate their unique role in modernity. While we use concrete case studies with direct US linkages, we hope to contribute to global history, not only to the history of US-(post-)Habsburg relations. Therefore, we plan to publish an edited volume based on the papers with an academic press (CEU Press/Amsterdam University Press, Purdue University Press, Routledge), if possible in Open Access.

Finally, with our venue, we intend to bring together early career scholars whose work resonates with each other but have not yet had the chance to engage in a discussion. We hope that this workshop will establish more lasting contacts, even serve as a core for a larger network, integrating scholars working on related topics.

PROGRAM

Day 1, July 9

13:00
Opening of the workshop

Gábor Egry, Matthias Morys, Anca Mandru, Gábor Dobó

13:30
Keynote lecture
(Chair: Gábor Dobó)

Malgorzata Mazurek, Columbia University

Becoming Like America?: World-Making and Norm-Setting in Post-Versailles Central and Eastern Europe

Why did isolationist America have such a significant impact on post-imperial Central and Eastern Europe after World War I? This lecture explains how the United States’ dual commitment to isolationism and globalism affected the countries that emerged from the collapse of European land empires. To become like America– business-friendly, technocratic, and affluent–these countries devoted their critical resources–people, capital, and knowledge–to state modernization and civilizational uplift. The pivot to the “West” and the alliance against the new Bolshevik state revealed deep tensions between new global rules and Central and Eastern Europe’s structural crises. Yet, it was also a period of creativity, experimentation, and knowledge circulation among post-imperial and early imperial economies, societies, and power-brokers, whether they adhered to, fought against, or misunderstood the new world hegemon.

15:00 Coffee break

15:30
Panel 1: Art and Culture
(Chair: Sara Silverstein)

This panel focuses on art and its social history. The papers highlight how Central-European artists, who often understood modern art as both a social act and a form of social reform, shaped what would become cultural Americanization, a global transformation of patterns of cultural consumption.

Julia Secklehner: “A real picture ballet” of modernism: Lisl Weil on stage in exile

Gábor Dobó: Relying on Instability: East-Central European Avant-Garde Periodicals and the Politics of Transnational Networks

17:00 End of day 1

Day 2, July 10

10:30
Panel 2: Social Sciences
(Chair: Matthias Morys)

The focus of this panel is on how Central European academics and thinkers, whose life trajectories linked the United States with Habsburg Austria and Central Europe, and whose work foregrounded progress, transformed their Central European experiences into theories and visions of general modernity. In this process, the United States served as a point of contrast, a political and academic context to engage with, and a power committed to changing the world. Meanwhile, (Post-)Habsburg Austria was not simply a laboratory but a fountain of ideas. The papers bring to the fore contributions that were prominent in their time but have often been forgotten since.

Ivo Maes and llaria Pasotti: Ragnar Nurkse’s vision on capital movements: From Vienna to Princeton

Péter Csunderlik: “Conquest by an illuminated Hitler or a real Federal Union” – Oscar Jászi and intellectuals’ plans in the US for the post-World War II world order

Anna Diem: Rudolf Broda’s network for progress and the US

Gabriel Godeffroy: Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europe and the United States of America (1918–1926)

12:50 Lunch break

13:50
Panel 3: Social Reform and Social Engineering
(Chair: Anca Mandru)

In this panel, the papers move away from theory, the focus of the second panel, toward action guided by new ideas aimed at improving society. They look at how practices inspired by progressivist ideas, born in the context of Habsburg Central Europe and envisioning a society that could be planned in advance, interacted with U.S. institutions and practices, and how these practices subsequently travelled back to the continent. The papers highlight not only original thought stemming from the region but also the role of institutions and their crucial place within the global network of connected actors.

Dóra Fedeles-Czeferner: Progressive Women’s Movements in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Social Reform and the Implementation of Social Engineering (1890s–1920s)

Bianca Centrone (online): From Urban Planning to Economic Coordination: Spatial Governance and Industrial Modernity

Vojtech Pojar: “Between Internationalism and Radical Biopolitics: The Paradoxes of a Post-Imperial Generation of Public Health Experts in East Central Europe”

Eszter Balázs: From Universal Humanity to Combat Philanthropy. The American Red Cross in East Central Europe during the First World War

16:10 Coffee break

16:30
Concluding roundtable – Post-Habsburg modernity, Central Europe and global history

Matthias Morys, Gábor Egry, Anca Mandru and Sara Silverstein (University of Connecticut)

17:30 End of workshop

ORGANIZERS:

ProletGard ERC Starting Grant project:

The Cultural Vanguard of Workers’ Movements: A Social History of East Central European Avant-Garde between the Two Wars (2026–2030)

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon research and innovation program (Grant agreement No. 101217736 – ProletGard)

Website: https://proletgard.kassakfoundation.org/

Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies

Website: https://botstiberbiaas.org/

Institute of Political History

Website: www.polhist.hu

Avantgárd

Kutatás